Crime Scene: Singapore

by Stephen Leather

  * * *

  Zul wakes up as the guard beats on the iron bars of his prison door. A key turns in, the prison door is thrown open and the guard walks in. ‘Someone is here to see you,’ he says, poking him mildly with a baton.

  He lifts his head, his hair dishevelled, the fuzz on his face forming a short beard. The guard appears like a ghost to him, blurry, a haloed figure, standing over him. He feels his shirt sleeves, starched by snot and drool, biting into his skin.

  ‘Who?’ He hears himself speak in a hoary voice.

  The guard helps him stand up, without saying a word. Zul follows him like a zombie and guesses about the person who has come to see him.

  Over the weeks or months—he has no idea of time—many people have visited him. Police officers, lawyers, prison guards. They have asked him questions to which he has no replies—educated man’s questions. How would he respond? He is not educated, he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know anything that the police want to know from him. Conspiracy, opposition, communist, terrorist … What sort of words are these, he wonders.

  Among his personal visitors, only his mother and brother Ali have come to see him. His mother did not say anything to him, only looked at him with tearful eyes, and ran her fingers on his hand. His brother had a snarl on his face. ‘You … ah … a disgrace to our family,’ he had growled. ‘You dead for us, you know. We don wan to see your face again, understand? So you better rot here and die!’

  He didn’t feel any anger towards his brother. What anger could he feel for a man whose mind and soul were twisted? His reaction was expected: Ali never liked him anyway. Zul had refused to help him in selling contraband cigarettes from Malaysia—the source of his part-time income after his full-time job in a security company. Zul preferred cleaning tables to selling contraband cigarettes—and his impertinence infuriated Ali.

  ‘Now who is here to meet me?’ he wonders as he passes through the corridor to the visiting room. The corridor is flanked by many dark cells, a world of shadows. Is he in Changi Prison already? He has no idea.

  Yousuf stands up from a chair when he sees Zul walking into the room. Zul gives him a faint smile. ‘I didn’t expect you would come here to see me,’ he says.

  ‘I had to come, brother,’ he says, helping Zul sit on a chair. ‘Melly has given me a letter for you.’

  ‘Melly!’ Zul’s eyes brighten up. ‘How is she? Why didn’t she come to see me?’

  ‘She went back to her country.’

  ‘Went back?’ he says, his fuzzy face a rampaged valley. ‘Just like that?’

  The brightness of his eyes dies down, like a bulb suddenly losing its burning filament.

  ‘The government sent her back, Zul. She didn’t want to go.’

  ‘Didn’t want to go. Gahmen sent her back,’ he repeated after him, like a dazed parrot.

  ‘She came to me before she left for Indonesia,’ Yousuf said, putting his hand in his shirt pocket. A letter emerged in his hands. ‘And gave me this letter for you.’

  ‘Can you read it for me?’ Zul pleaded.

  ‘Of course,’ Yousuf said.

  ‘Dear Zul,’ Yousuf starts reading the letter, written in longhand. From across the table, Zul can see the scribble. The letters are plumpish, like Melly herself.

  ‘I am so sad to know what has happened to you. You are in prison and I am being sent back home. My employment permit has been cancelled by your government. I wanted to come and see you one last time, but even that is not being allowed. So I came to brother Yousuf for his help.’

  Yousuf stopped, cleared his throat and asked, ‘You want me to read the entire letter?’ His voice has turned shaky.

  ‘Go on, I asked you to read already,’ Zul answers gruffly.

  ‘I wanted to come and confess my sins to you because I’ve done nothing short of sinning against an innocent man. That is you, Zul, my dimwit honest lover. You loved me so deeply, so honestly and there I was, deceiving you, sinning in my greed. A maid by day and a whore by night, sucking the smelly dicks of Chinese men—all for money. I had hoped that you would marry me and through you, I would get Singapore citizenship, and free myself from this life of want and disgrace …’

  ‘Stop, stop, stop!’ Zul shouts like a madman, shielding his ears with his hands, as if preventing them from molten lead that someone was pouring down his ear canal. ‘This is a lie, a big lie, my Melly cannot be like that,’ he sobs, beating his feet on the ground, his cuffs clinking.

  In a swoop, he seizes the letter from Yousuf’s hands, crumples it and throws it down on the floor, then tramples on it with his lightly shod feet.

  ‘I thought you a good man, Yousuf.’ He spits on the floor. ‘But no, you too side with them, you too gahmen—all wanting to drive me mad. I am not mad, let me tell you. You mad, you are all mad, you and this guard, and my brother Ali, and the gahmen who won’t allow me to marry Melly, all are mad. And Melly, she a good woman, and nobody call her a hooker, you hear!’

  Yousuf looks at him with his mouth agape, his gorge going up and down. The guard hovers around Zul, ready to catch the gorilla gone berserk.

  Zul staggers to the guard. ‘Here,’ he shouts, foam appearing at the corners of his mouth, ‘take me from here. Cane me, hang me, kill me, I don’t want to live anymore, don’t want to live in your mad, filthy gahmen-run world, don’t want …’

  The guard grabs a raging Zul and Yousuf sees him walk away from the room. He feels his throat go dry as Zul disappears. His hands reach for the pack of cigarettes in his trouser pocket, but then they remain frozen there for a while, remembering that smoking is not allowed inside that government building. ‘Tch,’ he clucks, and steps out.

  ALARIC LEONG is a proud Singaporean and aspiring author. Having worked as a PR writer, he decided to gravitate into a brand of fiction that hews a little more closely to reality. Another of his first attempts at fiction has been included in the Monsoon Books anthology, Best of Southeast Asian Erotica.

  ‘The Lost History of Shadows’ by Aaron Ang

  The Singapore we know today belongs to a different universe from the Singapore of the prewar era. Especially those last years before war broke out.

  In those days, this was a raucous port city, one that richly deserved its soubriquet: Sin Galore. There was an ample supply of all the leading vices, and much of the island was portioned off into jealously guarded fiefdoms of secret societies, gangs and petty criminals, each maintaining its dominion through vicious measures. Robbery, assaults and other forms of casual violence were, if not daily occurrences, nothing out of the ordinary.

  Still, even within this rich melange of crime, the slaughter in early December 1938 stood out for both its brutality and efficiency. For a time, this crime captured the public imagination, spinning various myths that defined how people in those days viewed Singapore.

  As the colonial police originally reconstructed the events of that night, it ran pretty much like this: Shortly after 1 a.m. on the morning of December 13, a group of five men were gathered around a table in the backroom of a dubious establishment on Keong Saik Road in Chinatown when three other men stormed into the room. Two of the men at the table drew their knives, then quickly realised they were out-matched: the three interlopers drew pistols and pointed them at the group.

  The two knife-wielders were promptly persuaded to drop their weapons to the floor and give full attention to the three gunmen. Then, or shortly thereafter, the three gunmen relieved their five victims of all their cash, watches and whatever other jewellery they had—and perhaps some other valuables that police could only guess at.

  Had it all ended there, this crime would hardly have stood out amongst the hundreds of other armed robberies Singapore police had to deal with during this period. But for some motive the police were never quite clear about, this robbery went beyond the robbery stage, and that is what pushed it into the realm of legend.

  First, the robbers ordered the three men on the left side of the table to put their hands over their eyes, ea
rs or mouths in the classic see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil triptych. The three robbers then proceeded to shoot their five victims; shoot them in a most systematic way. Each man at the table was shot once in the upper right side of the chest, once through the neck and once in the head, just above eyebrow level.

  Police speculate that the first five shots, into the chests, were to stun the men and render them unable to offer any further resistance. But the police Forensics Department pointed out that the third shot was thoroughly redundant: the blast through the throat or the one to the forehead alone would have killed the victims nicely.

  This degree of brutality led police investigators to conclude that the shootings followed the robbery: the sizeable wounds from the Webley revolver bullets produced so much blood, especially from the heads, that it would have been too messy, if not visually difficult, to remove money and valuables from the victims.

  The three gunmen then quickly left the scene: rushing out into Keong Saik Road, they darted to their left, turned a corner and disappeared. Their escape left a clutch of witnesses. Although it was fairly late, this was Keong Saik Road, and the police later turned up eight people who witnessed the rapid departure of three nervous-looking men and were willing to speak about it. Reports claimed that at least twice as many people were out on the street that night, near the club, and somehow suffered bouts of temporary blindness. All too typical of prewar Singapore.

  The crime quickly seized the imagination of the Singapore public. A big part of the reason, most observers agree, was the splash it received in the local press.

  In fact, the story was given a big push into legend by the front-page article in The Straits Times. This article was written by the famous, or—as some would have it—notorious Paul Haggerty. Haggerty had been a star journalist for the Manchester Guardian who’d gotten himself fired the previous year for insubordination. (A charge which included the fact that he was carrying on a sordid affair with his boss’s wife.)

  Haggerty found himself shipped off to the Far East with the hazy promise of a return to high-end British journalism if he behaved himself out there. But for his first six months here, Haggerty found himself smothered in boring assignments. His tendency to drink too much was stoked almost daily by the tedium. The Keong Saik Road case gave him the opening he needed; this was just the kind of journalistic red meat he loved sinking his teeth into.

  His article the following day opened this way: ‘The “shortest day of the year” proved to be very short indeed for five men at a private Chinatown opium party, including one of Singapore’s richest men.’

  That sentence contained two of the elements that catapulted this case into celebrity status. There was indeed some opium paraphernalia on the table when the police arrived, along with small spreads of opium. Even more eyebrow-raising was the make up of the quintet at that party. As Haggerty wrote, one of the five murdered men was indeed one of Singapore’s richest local businessmen, Tan Tong Hua. The main owner and head of Samtan Industries, Tan was not known for his visits to sleazy Chinatown clubs and there was a quick flurry of speculation as to why he was there that evening.

  Three of the murdered men were more typical denizens of these parts. All were known locally as petty criminals, marginal foot-soldiers of marginal Chinese gangs. These three—Koh Lee Pock, forty-three years old; Seng How Chook, nineteen; and Low Wee Hong, fourteen years old—had few resources, but many contacts within the netherworld of Sin Galore. But just what their association with one of the colony’s wealthiest and most respected men was, that baffled many.

  But the most intriguing part of the puzzle involved the fifth victim, a German diplomat by the name of Karl-Friedrich Hant von Herzberg. At the time of the murders, Hant von Herzberg was chargé d’affaires of the Bangkok embassy of the German Reich, a post he’d held for just over a year.

  Hant von Herzberg had travelled to Singapore on some ‘minor business’ according to the Bangkok embassy in its brief statement to the press. The exact nature of that ‘minor business’ was to become a major source of speculation in the coming months.

  Two days after the murders, a tight-lipped delegation arrived from Bangkok to retrieve the body. Except for filling out the necessary papers, they offered no assistance to the British authorities and returned quickly with their diplomat’s remains.

  A Nazi diplomat, a fantastically wealthy businessman, three small-time hoods, opium: it was the perfect recipe for making the case the most celebrated crime in Singapore in that decade. In fact, many Singapore residents, Asians and expats, took a kind of perverted pride in the killings. They felt it showed that Singapore too, could produce criminals whose brutality and cold-bloodedness matched the infamous in other crime capitals.

  The crime was even given its own nickname: the St Lucy’s Day Massacre. The echoes of the notorious St Valentine’s Day massacre in Chicago was purely intentional: the robbery-murders suggested this city too, had a capacity for brutal crime of an epic nature.

  Actually, there was a sixth victim that night. While the men were meeting in the back room, a thirteen-year-old girl who worked at the club was in a side room just off the front entrance, apparently trying to catch some sleep. She worked in the club as waitress, cleaning lady, general purpose dogsbody.

  Woken by the shots, she came stumbling out of her room to see what was going on. She was immediately rewarded for her concern with three quick shots to the abdomen. Not having been a part of the killers’ plans, she was left with that.

  She was the only victim still alive when police turned up some twenty minutes later. They found her lying, as Paul Haggerty described it, ‘covered with a tidy blanket of her own blood around her midriff.’ The police tried extracting useful information from her. Though her English bordered on non-existent, the Chinese officer on the scene did manage to get a few fractured sentences from her.

  The girl, known locally as ‘Agnes Slop-Mop’ was staring upwards as she kept repeating, ‘The men … the men …’

  ‘Yes,’ implored the police officer. ‘The men. What about the men?’

  ‘They wanted … They wanted to …’ And that was where she lapsed into unconsciousness from the loss of blood. She never regained consciousness; she died on the confused ride to the hospital.

  The death of a thirteen-year-old girl only made the case more piquant, stoking further outrage at the ‘savages’ who were responsible.

  The local police very much needed to solve this case quickly, but they seemed helpless at first. Having little to go on other than sketchy descriptions of the three nervous men who fled the club that night, they started clutching at anything they could find. All their fragile leads withered and turned into dust as soon as they started looking at them closely. They seemed totally lost.

  But then, they caught a lucky break. Two weeks after the killings, there was a bungled break-in at a ball-bearings warehouse. The lone burglar was surprised by police and seemingly cornered. However, he slipped into a back room, kicked out a small barred window and managed to crawl through. Finding a young policeman waiting for him there, he shot and wounded the officer in the shoulder, then turned to find three other members of the police team had arrived from around the corner. He fell to one knee and aimed his revolver.

  In the ensuing shoot-out with the police, the burglar was killed. (Shot eight times according to one report.) At the morgue, his identity was quickly determined: this was none other than Zhou Wei Tong, one of the colony’s more notorious criminals. His arrest sheet alone would have filled a small booklet. Somewhere along the road, he had acquired the soubriquet ‘Poison Claw Zhou’; few who knew him disputed his right to such a tag.

  The big breakthrough came when the authorities determined that the large, blood-red ruby ring Zhou was wearing had not long before been a prized possession of Tan Tong Hua. Also, in one pocket, they supposedly found a fancy brooch belonging to one of the three minor criminals killed that evening.

  The authorities also noted that the quasi-r
itualistic style of the shooting bore the traces of Zhou. He was known for putting his signature on a crime with such nasty touches.

  That settled the matter for the police: His record, his reputation and his possession of the two expensive pieces convinced them that Zhou was one of the St Lucy’s Day killers.

  Eight days later, police got their second break. A small-time hood was found down on the banks of the Kallang River near Thomson Road, a single bullet hole through the head. He had no impressive possessions tying him to the Massacre, but a number of police informants from the underworld assured the police that the dead man had served as a kind of intern to Poison Claw Zhou.

  With the death of this man, Chang Ten Li, police promptly declared the case closed. They issued a report saying that their investigations had determined the two killers were Zhou and Chang, and that the crime was a simple robbery-murder. Having robbed their victims, the hoodlums wanted to leave no witnesses who could ever identify them or testify against them.

  And what about those witnesses in the street who had seen three men leaving the club? A not unprecedented mistake, the police commissioner explained. Eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable—especially Asian eyewitnesses out in the wee hours of the morning, probably after excessive drinking or drug use. They see things that are not there. All too typical is that one ‘witness’ will imagine he saw something, convey this impression to a second, and before long, you’ll have the whole lot swearing that the man in the moon had swept down on a diamond-studded broom and stuffed a big wad of green cheese up the nose of one of their plaster gods.

  But there was one further complication to the police version. There were eighteen shots fired that morning, and the two Webley revolvers could only carry twelve bullets. Quite easily explained, said the police spokesman: one of the two gunmen simply reloaded after emptying his barrels and started shooting anew.

  Far from closing the case, this explanation quickly fuelled a firestorm of speculations about what really happened that night and why.